Data centers are hosting facilities for the hardware, such as servers, used to support intranet, internet, cloud computing, and other network-based computing. Modern data centers may have tens of thousands of servers and network equipment spread across warehouse sized buildings. With most data equipment having a life span of 3 to 5 years, the facility may have to constantly install, decommission, and repair equipment, which involves receiving, shipping, and temporarily staging equipment. A server or other piece of network computing equipment may represent a high value asset, resulting from a huge capital and operational investment. Accurately accounting for the status of this equipment may be a major factor in the operation efficiency of many information technologies.
Traditional asset management solutions for data centers, such as barcode schemes and manual surveys, may be time consuming and error prone. A radio frequency identification (RFID) tag system may streamline the asset management problem in many environments. A RFID tag is a tag, usually some type of micro-antenna, applied to a product that may produce a radio frequency signal that may be used to identify that product. An active RFID tag has an internal power source that the tag uses to produce the radio frequency signal. A passive RFID tag does not have an internal power source, instead altering and reflecting a radio frequency signal produced by a reader device.
However, a RFID tag system may be problematic in data centers. Radio frequency signals may have difficulty penetrating metal objects, which constitute a majority of data center equipment. For passive RFID tags, metal objects may weaken the energy of the radio frequency signals reaching the RFID tags and block the signal sent from the IDs. Active RFID tags may still be unreliable in data centers without a very dense deployment of RFID readers, which further increase the cost. Additionally, the battery life for the active RFID tags may be short. As multiple servers become piled upon each other, some servers inside the pile may be completely shielded by other servers.